1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to a dietary supplement for relieving physiological disorders and particularly relates to a composition which promotes the production of serotonin within the brain.
2. Description of Prior Developments
Attention has recently turned to nontraditional methods and compositions for treating various physiological disorders in an effort to provide relief in those instances where standard techniques have proven ineffective and where it is desired to avoid the undesirable side effects of conventional pharmaceutical compositions. One approach has been to attempt to provide relief through dietary supplementation of L-tryptophan (tryptophan).
Once within the brain, neurons convert tryptophan into the neurotransmitter serotonin. It has been found that an increase of tryptophan in the brain increases the brain's production of serotonin. Brain levels of serotonin have been shown to be linked to sleep, appetite, depression, and pain threshold. Disturbances in the brain causing reduced levels of serotonin have been linked to clinical (endogenous) depression, insomnia, excessive appetite, weight gain and lowered pain threshold.
While treatment of such disorders with supplemental tryptophan has heretofore produced positive results, there has been a wide range in the degree of relief achieved. Some patients appear to respond more favorably to such treatment than others for no previously known reason. Thus, complete relief has not consistently been assured by prior dietary tryptophan supplements. It is believed that these conventional supplements lack a complete combination of ingredients necessary to ensure the maximum relief achievable with every patient through tryptophan supplementation.
It is known that dietary supplementation of tryptophan increases the blood level of tryptophan and facilitates the passage of tryptophan across the blood-brain barrier into the brain. The increased amount of tryptophan in the brain permits a greater amount of tryptophan to be converted to serotonin.
In order for tryptophan to be converted to serotonin in the brain, it must cross a separating mechanism that exists between the blood vessels and the brain. To reach the brain, tryptophan requires a carrier transport mechanism in the form of a carrier protein which, literally, carries tryptophan across this very selective blood-brain barrier and into the brain. Not only is tryptophan carried by this transport mechanism, but other selected amino acids, called large neutral amino acids (LNAAs), are carried as well.
Tryptophan not only has to compete with the LNAAs for access to the transport carrier mechanism, it also has a lower affinity for the carrier system than does the LNAAs. To compound this situation further, tryptophan in foods is generally present in lower amounts than the LNAAs--particularly in animal proteins. All of these factors contribute to the amount of tryptophan that actually gets through to the brain, to be finally converted to serotonin.
There are numerous conditions, improper diet constitutes one of them, that can interfere with, and decrease, the amount of tryptophan that normally passes through the blood-brain barrier into the brain each day. This comes about when the ratio of tryptophan to LNAAs in the blood reaching the brain is lower than normal. This means that the number of molecules of tryptophan present at the blood-brain barrier is much smaller than the number of molecules of LNAAs present at the same blood-brain barrier. The LNAAs overwhelm the tryptophan such that very little tryptophan is provided passage into the brain as compared to the number of LNAAs that are provided passage.
In the attempt to correct this improper tryptophan/LNAA ratio, it was found that increasing the total protein intake obtained from normal dietary sources, in order to add more tryptophan to the system, results, paradoxically, in an even greater decrease in the amount of tryptophan reaching the brain. This is so because there are usually more LNAAs than there is tryptophan in food. Experimental studies have established the fact that increasing the amount of protein as food, in order to improve the tryptophan/LNAA ratio, only makes the tryptophan/LNAA ratio worse because of the greater intake of the LNAAs over the intake of the tryptophan.
With less tryptophan getting into the brain, less serotonin is formed, and a wide variety of disorders, including those noted above, begin to manifest themselves. Because these disorders stem from a biochemical imbalance involving the tryptophan-serotonin relationship, they cannot be corrected by any conventional medication. Such disorders are unmanageable by any conventional drug therapy because the drug does not address itself to the correction of this specific biochemical imbalance.
Accordingly, a need exists for a method and composition for transporting an effective dose of tryptophan across the blood-brain barrier into the brain and for promoting the conversion of tryptophan into serotonin. Moreover, a need exists for a composition which provides all the ingredients necessary to achieve the maximum relief possible through dietary supplementation of tryptophan.